Art. 593.2.Class Actions; Forum Non Conveniens

Article 593.2 picks up where Article 593.1 leaves off. Once a Louisiana court has certified a class action over a given transaction or occurrence, any other Louisiana court sitting on a related putative class action — one that, if certified, would cover overlapping plaintiffs and defendants suing and sued in the same capacities — can transfer that pending action to the court that already certified. The transfer is not automatic: it requires a contradictory motion, filed within thirty days of the certification, and the transferring court must find that the interests of justice and good cause support the move.

The article opens by overriding Louisiana's general forum non conveniens statute, Article 123, which governs when a Louisiana court can decline jurisdiction in favor of a more convenient forum, typically one outside the state. Article 593.2 does not rely on that general framework; it builds its own, narrower transfer power that operates only among Louisiana courts and only in the specific circumstance where a sister court has already certified a related class.

Read together, Articles 593.1 and 593.2 give defendants and courts two different tools for the same underlying problem — duplicate class litigation spread across Louisiana's district courts. Article 593.1 works before any certification, consolidating parallel putative actions into one court. Article 593.2 works after one court has already certified, letting a later or slower court defer to that certification rather than proceed with its own parallel action.